[nsamuell]

Maybe for the "big" decisions (like whether or not to store user data in the first place), but I'd argue that in the myriad of small decisions (like whether to copy the entire user object into an analytics table or just a pseudonymized id) I do think the average dev isn't as "respectful" as you think...

YMMV of course

[c1ll1an]

Fair - but I'm not sure we've made it technically easy on ourselves as developers to be "respectful". Right now it's expected that a dev might understand enough about the myriad of privacy laws that might affect their company's tech, the policies the company has and then design models that always enforce that safely. That seems a big ask - again, I agree with you that on the surface it might seem the average dev isn't as "respectful" as you'd think, but we should start by providing a set of tools/way of implementing privacy that make it feasible.

[PhantomRef82]

This is reminiscent of the early days of online shopping. When online shopping started to take off, the risk of having your credit card information stolen was higher than today. This was because credit cards were transmitted using the same means as other information at the time. That is, to say, insecurely. It wasn’t until later on that we began to see standards arise and libraries emerge that addressed the issue. This isn’t to say that the developers of the era didn’t care. They simply didn’t have the means to achieve what was needed. I think that we will see the same with data privacy in the future. Not every developer is a privacy expert and I don’t think that will ever be the case. Someone will come up with a set of tools accessible to every developer that will solve these issues in a standard way. I’ve seen it happen before and I’ll see it again. The old becomes new, history rhymes, etc etc.